Peter Solomon elected Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History

November 5, 2024

Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Criminology and Law at the University of Toronto, Peter Solomon, has been elected an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History – the highest honour the Society confers – recognizing distinguished historians whose scholarship has shaped the discipline of legal history.

Professor Solomon is recognized in Western scholarship as the foremost authority on Russian law, in both Soviet and post-Soviet variants. He has been studying and publishing in this field for almost fifty years, and has encouraged, nurtured, and inspired several generations of scholars interested in the not obvious and nonetheless vitally important question of how Russia’s legal system works. Solomon’s books and articles repeatedly challenged conventional assumptions about Russian law; these studies transformed interpretations, approaches and sources, and became classic references for scholars working on Soviet legal history.

Professor Solomon has reached beyond the Russian setting in his comparative studies on authoritarian law. He was deeply engaged in Russian reforms begun in the 1990s and has assisted in international legal projects in post-Soviet states. Responding to Russia’s imperial aggression in the 21^st century, Peter Solomon has been a generous advisor and host to legal specialists and scholars in or displaced from post-Soviet countries. Outstanding and innovative scholar, kind and inspiring teacher, engaged specialist on law in world history and politics, Peter Solomon is an ideal candidate to be named an honorary fellow of our society.

He graduated magna cum laude in history from Harvard College in 1964. He did graduate work at Columbia, where he received MA (1967) and PhD (1973) degrees in political science as well as a certificate from Columbia’s Russian Institute. Critical to his life work was his selection as a Fulbright-Hays exchange scholar to spend the academic year 1968-1969 at the Law Faculty of Moscow State University. Participation in the highly competitive and politically sensitive exchange program meant life in a Soviet dormitory with a full dose of political surveillance and a unique opportunity to study Soviet law from within. Solomon returned to Russia many times thereafter. He was a frequent guest of the Institute of State and Law in Moscow both as a sponsored member of officially sanctioned exchanges with the Soviet Union and, after 1991, as a visiting scholar. These journeys put Solomon into contact with many of Russia’s legal specialists, among them lawyers, judges, and historians. Outside the USSR, he was a researcher for the Soviet Interview Project from 1985-1987, responsible for interviews with jurists who had emigrated from the USSR.

Solomon lived and worked during dramatic and ongoing transformations of Russia’s politics and society: from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation, from communism to capitalism, from Gorbachev by way of Yeltsin to Putin, from cold war to cooperation to war again. These radical changes were far from what scholars thought the future would bring when Solomon started his academic career, but during six decades of turbulent transformations, he continued to do research on the Russian legal system, which, as he shows, has a tenacity and a culture central to the state’s operations and society’s possibilities.

The operations of Soviet law in what most thought to be the darkest years of Soviet repression was the subject of Solomon’s ground-breaking monograph, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Based on an enormous range and quantity of archival and published materials, the book introduced entirely new materials and offered provocative interpretations. Solomon argued that terror and the criminal law system coexisted under Stalin, who actively cultivated both means of rule. Stalin himself provided the Soviet criminal justice system with its most characteristic features – centralization of legal institutions, harshly punitive criminal sanctions, secrecy, the extensive use of administrative regulation, and a cadre of officials inclined to obey directives from their political superiors. One of Solomon’s most provocative conclusions concerned the consequences of the attempt, begun in the 1930s and intensified in the postwar period, to professionalize the criminal justice system by centralizing legal supervision and enhancing the education of legal specialists. According to Solomon, the fulfillment of these two objectives produced more compliant judges, less willing than their predecessors to risk their jobs, more willing to abide by party directives. The book fundamentally revised conventional interpretations of Soviet law and convincingly demonstrated that Stalin personally shaped criminal justice as a system of control in the USSR. Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin, considered a classic text in the west, was translated and published in Russian twice (1998 and 2008) and became widely referenced and praised there by legal historians.

Solomon produced many studies of Soviet and Russian legal systems over his career, by our count fifteen authored, co-authored and edited volumes, 68 articles and book chapters. Let us note a few outstanding features of this influential opus. One striking feature is Solomon’s focus, as suggested above, on the personnel of the legal system – their training, incentives, and personal goals. Solomon argues that what Professor Eugene Huskey calls the “seemingly mundane features of the legal system” matter a great deal to how the law functions and what purposes it serves. Professor Kathryn Hendley offers an example of Solomon’s insight in her discussion of his 1987 article, “The Case of the Vanishing Acquital: Informal Norms and the Practice of Soviet Criminal Justice.” The article addressed a reported phenomenon that seemed inexplicable: after Stalin’s death, the percentage of acquittals at Soviet courts fell, rather than increasing. The answer to this puzzle could be found in the system of evaluating judicial work: acquittals were treated as evidence of malfunctions in the investigatory and court system and could lead to the punishment of court personnel. The “mundane” fact of routine inspection thus explained what is now commonly accepted as the “accusatorial bias” in the Russian criminal justice system.

A second thread that runs through Professor Solomon’s oeuvre is attention to the everyday uses of the law in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. While western studies dealt primarily with high-profile trials, political repression, and harsh punishments, Professor Solomon’s work widened the lens on Russia’s judicial system, including the minor cases, civil and criminal, that outnumber by far those concerning political crime. This human touch pervades Solomon’s work, and is a hallmark of his most recent study, co-authored with Kathryn Hendley, The Judicial System in Russia (Oxford University Press, 2024). This volume, which extends back to the tsarist period and into Putin’s time, offers a comprehensive study of the court system. Solomon and Hendley deal with the disparities between political and everyday justice by arguing for the “dual” nature of the court system, a structural feature of Russian law that has endured for centuries.

Professor Solomon’s engagement with Russian law is not confined to the past. He has been an active scholar of Russia’s ongoing judicial reforms and has published numerous articles on post-Soviet procedure, the criminal code, the organs of prosecution and investigation, policing, the training and behavior of judges, rights, constitutional changes, and the work of the law in an authoritarian regime. In post-Soviet countries, Solomon’s work is of vital interest to both scholars and judicial reformers. His research on the Russian Federation dovetails with issues of interest to scholars in other regions as well. Professor Trochev of Nazabaev University notes that Solomon’s article, “Courts and Judges in Authoritarian Regimes,” published in World Politics in 2007 is a much cited reference for legal scholars and political scientists working on other world areas and on international legal projects.

Peter Solomon’s contributions to legal reform go well beyond scholarship. Over the course of his career, he has served as a consultant to many international legal endeavors, among them the European Union and the Central and East European Law Institute of the American Bar Association. Since 1991, he has been active in projects designed to enhance the quality and purpose of legal regimes in post-Soviet states. He worked with legal practitioners, judges, and officials to improve the quality of courts in Ukraine, Armenia, Kazakhstan, as well as in the Russian Federation itself. Among other initiatives, he took a leading role in the Canada-Russia Judicial Partnership program (2000-2008), designed to assist local courts in three cities in the Russian Federation in improving court practices. He was an active participant in judicial reform in Ukraine and contributed to the Kyiv Recommendations on Judicial Independence in Eastern Europe, South Caucasus, and Central Asia. These recommendations have served as a reference for human rights activists and judicial reformers from many countries. In the aftermath of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Professor Solomon has worked to advise and host Ukrainian graduate students and legal scholars at the University of Toronto.

This activism in legal reform and this care for scholars in difficulty is part and parcel of Professor Solomon’s long-term engagement with students, younger scholars, foreign researchers and legal specialists. Generosity, kindness, and inclusivity – these are the words that come to mind when thinking of Peter Solomon. Former students, scholars new to the legal history field, major figures in the Russian field, young and old and in between – all express their deep gratitude and affection for Professor Solomon’s consistent, thoughtful advice and gentle assistance. His conferences and co-edited, co-authored studies have brought together people from widely different preparations and approaches to work collaboratively on the exasperating and fascinating topic of Russia law. He has truly shaped both the life paths of legal historians across the huge Russian/post-Soviet space and the ideas, methods, and knowledge of the field of Russian legal history.

Let us honor Professor Peter Solomon, and his life time of scholarly innovation, of dedicated engagement with history and law, and of generous care for scholars from many countries, in good times and bad, with an honorary fellowship in the American Society for Legal History.